Infantry soldiers riding inside armored fighting vehicles may often lack the life-critical capability to see what is in the vicinity behind the vehicle before the ramp is dropped and the soldiers dismount onto the battlefield. Lacking an ability to see the battlefield behind the vehicle in various light conditions before dismounting prevents the squad leader or team leader from reviewing and rehearsing key immediate actions and assigning areas of responsibility. Secondarily, the driver of the vehicle may have limited visibility behind the vehicle such that when backing up, the driver may inadvertently damage objects behind the vehicle or cause injury. It will be appreciated that because many armored vehicles such as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle are on patrol in populated areas, there is a requirement to have situational awareness before the troops move out of the vehicle. In short, there must be a system to advise troops before they exit the vehicle.
While there are a large number of systems that provide rear view cameras for vehicles, none provide situational awareness for troops housed within a vehicle who have limited ability to see what is going on outside of the vehicle.
Most importantly, armored vehicles are provided with armor plate and other protective devices, with the vehicle armor being designed to provide hull integrity for assuring maximum protection by eliminating areas that can be breached.
Were one to wish to provide such armored vehicles with external cameras, sensors and the like, connecting them to electronics and monitors within the vehicle of necessity would require putting holes in the armor, a breach of hull integrity. Thus mounting external units on an armored vehicle is to be avoided because the security afforded by the originally designed armor is impaired.
As a result, there is a need to provide existing vehicles with retrofit situational awareness packages that do not alter the impregnability of the armoring system originally provided for the vehicle.
Moreover, in addition to the need to provide situational awareness, if one were to rely only on cameras operating in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, insurgents or enemy soldiers might be able to hide behind existing objects and blend in. To become visible, it would therefore be appropriate to use near-infrared or infrared cameras so that the body heat of an insurgent would produce a thermal image that when presented on a screen produces a striking indication of the presence of the enemy.
Finally, in order to provide situational awareness, it would be desirable to provide a retrofit kit that included laser range finders, LIDARs or other radar-like sensors so as to complement camera-generated images and provide positional data for potential targets that can be displayed prior to troop deployment. Such devices could also include acoustic ranging devices.